Former half term-governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, was in the news twice last week—with her assertion that President Barack Obama is the reason why her son, Track, hits women, and with her endorsement of GOP presidential hopeful Donald J. “I could ‘shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters” Trump.

Her bizarre, rambling, right-wing-talking-point word salad endorsement of Trump has been cleverly used as source material for a short 26-second video featuring Looney Tunes’ popular angry cowboy, Yosemite Sam. The edit syncs quite well and leaves no question that Palin, herself, is essentially a cartoon character.

Former half term-governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, was in the news again this week. This time the inexplicable media darling made headlines with her bizarre “right-winging’, bitter clingin’” Donald Trumpin endorsement speech, and her assertion that President Barack Obama is the reason why her son, Track, hits women. Thanks Obama!

Palin, who has a history of insane rambling speeches, appeals to the “tell it like it is” crowd—as long as “telling it like it is” means a string of incoherent jingoistic, xenophobic talking points. Last night on The Daily Show, host Trevor Noah described her as a bag of Scrabble tiles come to life. If she sounds like an idiot speaking in tongues, it is because this is precisely what she is.

Now, you can create your own Palin rants with the handy “Palinisms” random phrase generator.

This phrase generator seems to work in much the same way as Palin’s own mind. You press a button and it mashes together a bunch of right-wing tropes that may or may not have any meaning whatsoever… but IT DOESN’T MATTER. The important thing is the “telling it like it is” part, the “special sauce” as it were…

As the editor of a blog that used to generate a lot of traffic with virtually any item, however small, that mocked Sarah Palin, believe me when I tell you that five years after her debut on the world stage, no one really cares that much about the snowbilly grifter anymore.

Not like they used to. Not even close.

Nope, an item on Sarah Palin will bring in a negligible amount of traffic, so little, in fact that it’s not even worth the effort anymore. “Sarah Palin does something stupid AGAIN” has stopped being effective as “click bait,” in the same way that “Glenn Beck says something outrageous AGAIN” has. Or “The 25 greatest moments from Murphy Brown” (as actually seen on Yahoo! earlier this week, I didn’t make that one up). Or whatever idiocy Ted Nugent is into. Who gives a shit about these assholes? No one does. At least our readers don’t. You let us know loud and clear how disinterested you are in these people and we see the evidence of this on Google Analytics, ChartBeat, and in Twitter, Facebook and Google+ shares.

Which brings up the question: Does a Sarah Palin appearance on The Today Show, or even Fox News, really bring in ANY extra eyeballs? Based on my own (admittedly left-leaning, but very large as these things go) control group, I’d have to wager that the answer is a definite “NO.” Going on what I’ve seen, she’s a total bust these days. Doesn’t move the needle on the traffic dial. Flatline. Nothing. Why do we still see her all the time saying “words” in the “lamestream media”? I honestly couldn’t tell you, but given that every newsgathering or content aggregating entity has access to the very same traffic measurement tools that I have, I don’t expect that she’s got much left cultural currency after this current round of “war against Christmas” media appearances to promote her new book that someone else wrote, for people who don’t read…

Having said all that, I certainly would have thought there would have been a terrific amount of interest in an NBC correspondent suggesting that Sarah Palin should have someone shit in her mouth and piss in her eyes, and this is exactly what Martin Bashir did in an MSNBC commentary segment on Friday that is, for the most part, only being discussed on the right.

How did this escape wider notice?

If you will hit play, you will see one of the most incendiary things I have ever seen someone say on a cable news channel about another person… ever.

Incendiary, sure, but I’d have to say… he’s right. Without further ado, here’s Martin Bashir saying what a lot of people think about Sarah Palin:

With Sarah Palin’s enthusiastic endorsement of her cousin’s group as “the most patriotic band I know!”, Albuquerque’s Missing Stateside are poised to become one of the biggest local bands in middle-American butt-rock. For those of you not familiar with the rural areas of fly-over states, these kinds of bands are as ubiquitous as they inescapable. At every state fair, there is a Missing Stateside. At every dive bar, there is a Missing Stateside. At every fish fry, barbeque, Fourth of July? Of course there is a Missing Stateside!

JD Morgan, Palin’s kin, started the band on a military base in Iceland in 2003, during which time I’m sure both Sigur Rós and Björk felt an inexplicable chill in their bones. The dudes have since opened for such heavy-hitters as Foghat, Steppenwolf, Skid Row and even Quiet Riot. As horrifying as I find this particular “genre” of music, it’s fish in a barrel stuff to mock, and honestly I’ve no particular inclination to tear apart the band of what appears to be a gracious, mannerly guy, who’s simply playing his music. Like I said, there are a million bands exactly as terrible as this one.

Besides, I’m having flashbacks from listening to that song, and I need to go lie down. Proceed at your own caution.

The stupider that you act, the more the media will pay attention to you. This immutable law of media is proven daily by the likes of the Kardashian family, The Situation, Snooki and… Sarah Palin. All of them are masters at appealing to idiots. Fellow idiots relate to them. Dum-Dums think they’re “cool.” They are icons of idiocy and they are handsomely remunerated for their trademarked brands of frivolity and foolishness.

Palin co-hosted Fox and Friends yesterday, and just like Miss Utah over the weekend, in her own inimitable way she managed to chip away just a lil’ teensy bit at America’s collective IQ. Even if you weren’t watching.

Last night on The Daily Show, fill-in host John Oliver suggested that we all start ignoring the snowbilly grifter and give ourselves a national “brain enema.”

On her Facebook page, apparently the only outlet open to her since Fox News showed her the door, Sarah Palin stepped into a steaming pile of rhetorical dogshit on the topic of the so-called “sequester.”

On Tuesday, in a post, non-ironically titled: “D.C.: Cut the Drama. Do Your Job,” the reality TV drama queen who quit halfway through her own job as Alaska governor had this to say:

If we are going to wet our proverbial pants over 0.3% in annual spending cuts when we’re running up trillion dollar annual deficits, then we’re done. Put a fork in us. We’re finished. We’re going to default eventually and that’s why the feds are stockpiling bullets in case of civil unrest.

Oh boy. Nice way to “wee-wee” up the low IQ rubes who still care about the opinions of a certain snowbilly grifter. It’s so hard to tell if she’s just plain stupid, or in fact really crafty, like Glenn Beck is. The thing is, in Palin’s case, I’m not sure that there is a discernible difference. I don’t look at Beck and think “dumb” (“Asshole” is a word that comes more readily to mind. “Crazy,” too, but never dumb). Glenn Beck is just cynical but Sarah Palin’s stupidity, her obvious idiocy, is THE ACTUAL REASON that Tea party-types (still) find her so “refreshing.”

Palin - who wrote on her Facebook page on Tuesday, “We’re going to default eventually and that’s why the feds are stockpiling bullets in case of civil unrest” - joins conservatives Alex Jones of InfoWars.com, who wrote about the ammo buy last year, and radio host Mark Levin, who said on his radio program earlier this month that the government is “arming up” because society is “unraveling.”

“Law enforcement and national security agencies — they play out multiple scenarios. They simulate multiple scenarios. I’ll tell you what I think they’re simulating: the collapse of our financial system, the collapse of our society and the potential for widespread violence, looting, killing in the streets, because that’s what happens when an economy collapses,” Levin said on his radio program.

You’d think that after five years of being a walking, talking, Facebooking definition of a fucking idiot that Sarah Palin might, you know, be slightly more circumspect about her information sources, especially when they’re coming straight from anonymous ALL CAPS forwarded emails, WorldNut Daily, originated with Alex Jones or have already been debunked on Snopes.com, but no…

A common refrain seen in comments across the blogosphere of late is that an Obama win in November would be the best thing that could possibly happen for “opposition” Fox News.

I’m not so sure about that.

Even as but a “casual consumer” of what Fox News has on offer—I’m someone who usually only sees the gnarliest Fox clips belched up by the Internet—I can’t help but notice just how fucking tired it all seems lately. The same people saying the same damned things over and over and over again. It goes without saying that Fox News viewers tend not to be the sharpest, or best informed, marbles in the bag, but I would imagine that even those low IQ Jim-Bobs and Billy-Joes are getting tired of hearing the same people saying the same damned things over and over and over again. The obvious repetition of Republican talking points and constant, never-wavering anti-Obama kvetching—can it really go on like this for another four years without a major reinvention and a totally clean slate of new faces?

Fox’s audience share, while still strong, has been falling for years. Even if its audience doesn’t exactly desert Fox News, it’s an unavoidable fact of the yawning grave awaiting us all that their audience is dying off in great number with every passing year. Cranky old white guys aren’t being generated by the gene pool fast enough anymore. Certainly not in number enough for the Republican Party to survive, that’s seems demographically assured, so why should Fox News be any different?

Not only is Fox News becoming mind-numbingly repetitive—or even MORE mind-numbingly repetitive than it’s been for years, I should clarify—which is quite difficult, if you think about it, being a business which should theoretically thrive on novelty, it’s increasingly feeling completely anachronistic, like seeing the Spice Girls turning up again at the Olympics. Moving forward who is going to advertise on the network save for Geritol, Depends adult diapers or those “Help, I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” informercials? Fox News has a demographic every bit as, um, finite, shall we say, as print newspaper subscribers.

Fox News saw an overall 17% decline in viewership in March 2012 and there was a 27% drop with younger viewers from the year before. In May, Fox News was down about 21% during prime time in the 25-to-54 group. The only demographic sticking with Fox seem to be Social Security beneficiaries. I’d love to see the numbers for the percentage of Fox News viewers puttering around with portable oxygen tanks or who drive one of those scooters you always see advertised on the network.

Sean Hannity? Sarah Palin? Laura Ingraham? Ann Coulter? Who the fuck cares anymore what these people think? We already know. They must be bored saying this shit. Are you in the least bit curious, or do you really wonder how much Sean Hannity will hate on anything and everything that Obama says or does? Do you expect any surprises from his show? EVER? I mean this is some of the worst, weakest shit on offer. No one watches CNN anymore (it’s good for the treadmill as far as I am concerned) but compared to Fox News, it’s like at least they try!

Doesn’t this clip from last night’s O’Reilly Factor feel like you’re watching some sort of “nostalgia” news channel for old people? How much longer will Fox News president Roger Ailes think Sarah Palin is doing his network more good than harm? AIles should try to renew his network’s mission and inject some fresh blood into the team before it’s too late. If he’s legacy-conscious, it’s imperative that he act now. Ailes needs to get rid of the deadwood and dead-brained Fox “talent” who still think it’s 2009. If he doesn’t reinvent Fox News soon, at 72, he runs the risk of seeing his brainchild croak before he does.

“If Sarah Palin were black, her daughter’s out of wedlock, “baby daddy drama” would have been presented as an example of both pathological behavior and a dysfunctional family that is symbolic of the social problems in that community.

If Sarah Palin were black, never would the poor decision making by the Palin family be marked off as challenges overcome, or deeds to be valorized.

If Sarah Palin were black, her neo-secessionist husband would have been the death knell for her political career, because as we all know you can’t trust “those people.”

If Sarah Palin were black, her lack of intellectual curiosity, willful and cultivated ignorance, and lack of grace both written and spoken, would not be taken as “folksy.” Instead, Palin would be viewed as unqualified for any public office.

If Sarah Palin were black she would be tarred and feathered as an “affirmative action baby.”

Just goes to show how far Palin’s whiteness can take her. Zero intellect, two high school drop-outs, an unwed teen mother, a quitter of the one major job she had. Master of hateful coded language targeting opponents as not “real Americans”. Belongs to a church outside of the mainstream. Still a top GOP candidate.

Mexicans may have woken up the day after their election worried that they’d chosen a “himbo” who has never read a book version of Sarah Palin to lead their country in the form of seemingly empty-headed pretty boy president-elect Enrique Peña Nieto, but it might be worse than even that nasty nightmare come true: What if Peña Nieto is more like a closeted gay OJ Simpson/John Edwards kind of homicidal super-cad hybrid character?

Agustín Humberto Estrada Negrete, a former director and teacher at a school for children with special needs, claims to have been Peña Nieto’s homosexual lover for seven years while Peña Nieto was governor of Mexico state and married to Monica Pretelini. Estrada Negrete claims that Peña Nieto’s wife discovered him and Peña Nieto inflagranti and an argument between husband and wife ensued. When Peña Nieto started to beat his wife, Estrada Negrete decided it was time to leave. The next thing he knew, Monica Pretelini was dead. Since Estrada Negrete had been beaten before by Peña Nieto, he is convinced that Peña Nieto killed his wife. In an interview, Estrada Negrete said that after Monica Pretelini’s January 2007 death, Peña Nieto cried upon Estrada Negrete’s breast, “I went too far.”

On May 12, 2007, Peña Nieto’s deceased wife’s bodyguards were murdered while accompanying Peña Nieto’s three children, their maternal grandparents and aunt in Veracruz. Only the truck of the bodyguards was targeted; the family was unhurt. Estrada Negrete attests that these were the same bodyguards who would come and pick him up, in the same truck, for his assignations with Peña Nieto.

On May 17, 2007, just four months after the death of Peña Nieto’s wife, Estrada Negrete participated in an LGBT event, posing in a red dress. The photo of him in a dress made it into the papers and since then, Estrada Negrete’s life (as well as the lives of his family and the mothers of the school children who supported him) has been in grave danger. Estrada Negrete says this was the end of his relationship with Peña Nieto, since he had always been warned by Peña Nieto that there would be dire consequences if he came out of the closet. Estrada Negrete lost his job, was arrested twice for minor charges, tortured and gang-raped in jail, had death threats written on the walls of his school and inside his home and finally someone tried to kill him with a plastic bag over his head. Left for dead on the street, luckily the Red Cross saved him. In a wheelchair he escaped to the United States in 2010 with his political asylum papers in hand. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights filed a precautionary measure in Mexico to protect Estrada Negrete and his family and eventually was able to get the Mexican government to pay Estrada Negrete’s teacher’s back-pay. He lives in San Diego now, still fearing for his life but denouncing Peña Nieto and telling his story any chance he gets.

Adding to the mystery, on the day of Peña Nieto’s wife’s death, the announcements were all over the place. First, the governor’s own spokesperson announced that she had died from an overdose of anti-depressants (other reports said sleeping pills), then that she was brain dead, then finally, the doctor who had been treating her for two years made an announcement that she had been having seizures and that she had suffered, this time, from a fatal one, which caused cardiac arrhythmia and in turn respiratory arrest, from which she died. No wonder Peña Nieto was so confused in a May 2010 TV interview with respected Univisión journalist Jorge Ramos, when Ramos asked Peña Nieto how his wife had died. He couldn’t answer. He babbled on and on like he did at the Guadalajara book fair when asked what books he’d read that influenced his life. Ramos had to remind him that his wife died of an epileptic seizure. We think that Peña Nieto should have said in Guadalajara that the book that most influenced him was, If I Did It, by OJ Simpson.

Of course, all the bad things happened when he was just a tyke (in his thirties). Now he’s a man (in his forties). And president. So we’re sure he’s learned his lesson, right? Well, all is not well in the soap-opera fairy tale of Peña Nieto and Angelica Rivera, his soap-opera star wife. On March 13 of this year, Angelica Rivera was admitted to a hospital, bruised and beaten. Mexican radio station Radio Formula confirmed that Rivera was hospitalized for two days in March after she “fell from the stairs.” On May 29, Mexican actress Laura Zapata (Tony Mottola’s sister-in-law) tweeted that Angelica Rivera was severely beaten by Peña Nieto and hospitalized again. This time, no media outlets confirmed Angelica’s stay in the hospital, because according to Laura Zapata, the attending physicians were told not to say a word.

“Wasilla makes Twin Peaks look like a walk in the park. It’s a devout evangelical community. Sevety-six churches with a population of only six thousand, and the crystal meth capitol of Alaska.”

The movie that I’ve been raving about to everyone since I saw it on Netflix last week, and that I want to recommend to you, too, dear reader, is Nick Broomfield’s mind-blowing documentary Sarah Palin: You Betcha! When the film played festivals last year, it got a lot of attention, but then it was promptly forgotten about before most people ever had a chance to see it. I had forgotten about it myself, but when I saw that it was on Netflix, I couldn’t hit play fast enough.

First off, it’s not that it’s a “good film,” per se, because it’s most certainly not, but man is it entertaining. Nick Broomfield is a canny and yet extremely lazy documentarian, and Sarah Palin: You Betcha! is chock-a-block full of Broomfield falling back (again and again) on his standard Broomfieldian tropes (chasing people with a microphone as they drive away from him; implying that anyone who tells him to fuck off has a hidden agenda; having doors literally slammed in his face; asking “inopportune” questions in public). But Nick Broomfield, a pioneer in the “You get a documentary PLUS ME” school of film-making and his annoying shtick IS NOT THE POINT of Sarah Palin: You Betcha!!

Sarah Palin and her family are the point, of course. And let me tell ya, the fuckin’ Kardashians of Wasilla do not come off like very well-adjusted people here… No, not at all.

We’ve read about many of the things covered in the film and the narrative arc—a dim, but steel-willed former beauty queen becomes the mayor of a small Alaska town and rules over it like a peevish mean girl fascist dictator, then becomes governor of the state and then the GOP’s VP nominee in short order—is a familiar one, but to actually see and hear people talk who have known her for years (or their entire lives, some of them) and who line up tell their fucked-up Sarah Palin war stories with venom dripping from their fangs (or alternately like kicked dogs) is nothing short of breath-taking, riveting as hell and bust-a-gut funny, too.

With his usual pseudo-bungling charm Broomfield even manages to talk his way into an on-camera interview with Sarah Palin’s father (who quickly sours on the British film-maker), her former brother-in-law (who viciously goes to town on her ass. I found him quite credible) as well as various people Palin has fucked over, froze out or back-stabbed over the years, such as her loyal chief of staff and one time campaign manager. Certainly there is no shortage of former friends and colleagues who have been cruelly thrown under a bus by the imperious Queen Sarah, who comes off TEN TIMES MORE CRAZY than you’ve ever dared to suspect in Sarah Palin: You Betcha!

Of course, the notion of how frightening it was that this idiotic ignoramus got as close as she did to accidentally occupying the Oval Office is by now a only an academic—and yet no less nightmarish—consideration, making the in retrospect “what if?” implications of Broomfield’s Sarah Palin: You Betcha! all the more powerful (and yes, fucking funny in a gallows humor kind of way). What we didn’t know at the time, could have really hurt us. Let me conclude here by saying that Sarah Palin: You Betcha! would make a damned good double bill with Stanley Kubrick’s slightly less unnerving Dr. Strangelove.

This trailer gives away precious little of what delirious insanity awaits you in Nick Broomfield’s Sarah Palin: You Betcha!.

Sarah Palin might be a fucking idiot, but as the saying goes, a stopped clock is right twice a day. Via Politico:

“I think that the Democrats there understand that the president’s no-show represents the fact that Obama’s goose is cooked,” Palin told Greta Van Susteren on Fox News soon after networks called Walker the projected winner of the historic recall. She was referring to President Barack Obama’s decision not to campaign for Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett.

As she denounced Obama’s “hopey changey stuff”, the former Alaska governor continued: “More and more Americans realize that what Wisconsin has just manifested via this vote … is the complete opposite of what president Obama and the White House represents today.”

Palin predicted that the Obama administration will try to downplay Walker’s victory and distance itself from the GOP’s win in Wisconsin.

“Jay Carney — can’t wait to see how he spins all this and ignores it, and President Obama himself,” she said. “They’re going to really try to distance themselves from this despite the fact that they, leading their lapdogs in the leftist media, made this a front page story for how many months? Months and months.”

She’s 100% correct.

Democrats can argue all they want that the WI recall election’s blowout conclusion has nothing to do with Obama’s electoral fortunes in the state—or nationally—but they’re just whistling past the graveyard.

It was fucking ridiculous to watch the deer-in-the-headlights pundits on MSNBC last night try to spin Walker’s victory AS IF it was, in fact, good news for Obama.

By that standard the 2010 election must have been terrific for Democrats also…

Sarah Palin’s nuclear-powered hubris is beginning to border on surrealism if she really thinks she’s ever going to become the President. (Not that I’m hoping that she doesn’t get the GOP nomination in a dead-locked convention this summer, because I most certainly do!)

It would be the defining moment of recent American history if the dingbat who recently spoke this jabberwocky…

[Obama is] underestimating the wisdom of women. Because women understand there is access to preventative care and contraception out there, and we don’t need government to tell our employers that they must provide that for us.

Truly, it is a war on our religious liberties and that violation of conscience that he would mandate that is un-American because it violates our First Amendment in our Constitution.”

... were to accept the Presidential nomination at a deadlocked Republican convention this summer.

On Fox Business Network’s Follow the Money program the other day, host Eric Bolling tossed Sarah Palin a softball when the two discussed a brokered convention. She took the bait like a fish chomping on a hooked worm. Quite like that, in fact…

“If one of the nominees, one of the GOPers, doesn’t get enough delegates, it could go to a brokered convention,” said Fox Business Network’s Eric Bolling in an interview. “If it does get to that, and someone said, ‘Governor, would you be interested,’ would you be interested?”

“For one, I think that it could get to that. … If it had to be closed up today, the whole nominating process, then we could be looking at a brokered convention. … Nobody is quite there yet, so I think that months from now, if that is the case, all bets are off as to who it will be, willing to offer up themselves up in their name in service to their country.”